Asia Pacific’s race to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) is exposing a growing mismatch between digital ambition and cyber readiness. As AI becomes embedded across cloud, data and enterprise workflows, cybersecurity leaders are quietly shifting focus from stopping every attack to ensuring systems can withstand failure without disrupting growth.
That shift is being driven by a worsening threat environment. “Breach rates globally are rising 17% year-over-year, with 55% of organisations affected in the past 12 months alone,” says Shane Buckley, president and chief executive officer of Gigamon.
Highly connected digital hubs are increasingly exposed. Singapore now ranks as the third-largest global source of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) traffic, a trend Buckley links to the city-state’s dense concentration of data centres and cloud infrastructure being exploited by overseas attackers.
As adversaries adopt AI and automate their tactics, Buckley says traditional security models are struggling to keep up. “As adversaries continue to outpace traditional defences, fueled by AI and increasingly sophisticated tactics, organisations will no longer be able to rely on periodic or reactive risk assessments,” he says.
Regulation is tightening alongside these risks. Recent amendments to Singapore’s cybersecurity regime now require designated essential service providers that depend on third-party-owned critical information infrastructure to secure legally binding commitments covering security standards, audits, incident notification and reporting.
Buckley says the changes reinforce accountability across increasingly complex supply chains, just as cyber insurers begin tying premiums and coverage to demonstrable monitoring practices.
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“Real-time risk assessment powered by deep observability will become both a governance requirement and a financial lever, ensuring organisations detect and respond to threats before they escalate,” he adds.
Across the region, these pressures are converging around a critical inflection point. Mohan Veloo, chief technology officer for Asia Pacific, China and Japan at F5, highlights that the pace of AI deployment is forcing security out of its traditional silo and into the core of enterprise decision-making.
“As the region’s rapid push into AI and expanding digital economies reshape how organisations operate, security can no longer sit on the sidelines. It must be embedded directly into the systems and decisions that will define the region’s next chapter of digital growth,” he says.
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Factors influencing the threat landscape
Veloo points to four structural shifts reshaping the threat landscape. The first is the accelerating urgency of post-quantum readiness as organisations confront the growing risk of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks. Rather than overhaul existing systems, hybrid cryptography is emerging as the most pragmatic path.
The second issue is application programming interface (API) fragility, particularly as agentic AI increases machine-to-machine traffic and exposes gaps between AI ambition and security execution.
The third shift is geopolitical. Governments across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) are investing heavily in sovereign AI infrastructure, treating compute, data and AI pipelines as strategic assets that must be locally governed and secured.
Veloo says this raises the importance of quantum-safe communications, AI runtime security and consistent application delivery frameworks. Underpinning all of these trends is a broader elevation of digital resilience, as hybrid multicloud environments and AI-driven workflows add layers of operational complexity.
That focus on resilience is especially pronounced in cloud security. According to Daniel Toh, chief solutions architect for APJ at Thales, systemic outages and cascading dependencies are forcing organisations to rethink long-held assumptions. “Systemic cloud outages and cascading dependencies will mandate a fundamental shift from prevention to mandatory operational resilience.”
He points to industry analysis showing that 44% of cloud security incidents are traced back to identity and access management misconfigurations, highlighting persistent weaknesses in how organisations implement the shared responsibility model.
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“In 2026, organisations will prioritise resilience over total prevention, accepting that vendors will fail,” he says, adding that this will drive stricter least-privilege access, multi-region redundancy and continuous testing of response plans.
Insider threats
Even as infrastructure and architecture take centre stage, human-centred risk remains one of the most difficult challenges. Jennifer Cheng, director of cybersecurity strategy for APJ at Proofpoint, highlights AI is accelerating insider threats even as it becomes part of the defence.
She cites Proofpoint research showing that two in five enterprises in Singapore view data loss via public or enterprise generative AI tools as a top concern, while nearly half lack sufficient visibility and controls.
At the same time, AI is increasingly being used to strengthen security operations. “In 2026, we will see AI security agents meaningfully improve SOC efficiency by handling more ‘entry-level’ actions, triage and automation at scale,” Cheng says.
The rise of AI agents or autonomous systems is also creating new categories of insider risk. “Insider risk isn’t just emerging from rogue employees or compromised accounts, but also AI agents that operate autonomously with diverse privileges, allowing them to bypass security oversight and amplify data exposure,” shares Gareth Cox, vice president for APJ at Exabeam.
Exabeam research shows that 75% of cybersecurity professionals in Asia Pacific and Japan believe AI is making insider threats more effective, while 69% expect insider incidents to rise in the coming year.
Those risks extend beyond technical controls into human psychology. Findlay Whitelaw, a security researcher and strategist at Exabeam, says social engineering is evolving beyond phishing into more subtle forms of manipulation. AI-enabled attackers are increasingly using “vibe hacking”, where messages mimic the tone and authority of executives, increasing the likelihood that employees comply simply because the communication feels familiar.
As AI accelerates digital transformation, organisations are being forced to accept that breaches, outages and failures are inevitable. Those that embed resilience, visibility and disciplined access controls into their foundations will be better placed to sustain growth without exposing themselves to avoidable risk.
